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Academic Hospitalist Taskforce Quality Portfolio 
Rationale and Development
Endorsed February 2009

The ACLGIM/SGIM Academic Hospitalist Taskforce is committed to identifying and addressing specific challenges that Academic Hospitalists may face.  Documenting activities in quality improvement or patient safety may be crucial to the career advancement and success of Academic Hospitalists.  Yet work and achievements in these areas may not align with classic career paths or fit standard metrics used to assess academic success.  Reconciling this conflict was identified by the Taskforce as a major challenge to not only Hospitalists, but any academician engaged in such work.  Additionally, we found that Division Chiefs were interested in methods to advise, formally evaluate, and ultimately promote those involved in quality improvement or patient safety.  Thus, our Taskforce has created the ‘Quality Portfolio’ (QP) to fill this void and help meet unmet demands.

The Quality Portfolio (QP) is intended to formally organize and document one’s activities in quality improvement. The design and function of the Quality Portfolio is meant to parallel that of the Educator’s Portfolio, which is widely used as an effective tool to document achievement and success in education.

 

We designed the QP to parallel the Educators Portfolio (EP), namely to capitalize on the EP’s wide recognition, minimize duplicative efforts, and draw upon expertise of those involved with the development of the EP. After determining which ‘domains’ the QP should contain, we drafted prototypes to populate with activities from our members to evaluate the degree to which our framework captured the varied work of our group. We vetted early versions through local contacts including Division Chiefs, to establish ‘proof of concept.’ We continued to modify the QP and agreed that the most useful final product should include an outlined QP framework, detailed instructions, and an example to guide users.

We sought external vetting of our final product from appropriate stakeholders and our final review included 15 members from 10 Institutions, consisting of 8 Division Chiefs, 5 Chairs or Vice Chairs; with 10 at the Professor level representing a diversity of roles including: Director for Education, Assoc. Dean for Faculty Affairs, and Assoc. Dean for Curriculum. The majority of feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and most thought the QP would be a valuable addition to their current evaluation process.

We envision the Quality Portfolio being used as either a stand-alone document to succinctly document one’s work, accomplishments, and focus in quality improvement, or as an adjunct to the traditional CV. We think the Quality Portfolio fills a present void in the existing system of documenting academic activities. It is not meant to replace, but rather to augment the current methods of documentation of academic productivity and we would encourage local adaptation and implementation.

We feel our Quality Portfolio speaks to a broad interest base and could benefit those seeking to document success in Quality Improvement across various care settings and disciplines. The Quality Portfolio has been endorsed by SGIM and ACLGIM.

Our immediate goals are to incorporate the Quality Portfolio into the curriculum of the inaugural 2009 Academic Hospitalists Academy (a joint SGIM, ACLGIM and SHM ‘boot camp’ for early career Academic Hospitalists scheduled annually in October/November). We also plan to disseminate the Quality Portfolio through various SGIM publication modalities and plan workshops for the annual and regional meetings.


Sincerely,

Benjamin B. Taylor, MD, MPH (UAB)
Bradley Sharpe, MD (UCSF)
Vikas Parekh, MD (Michigan)
Anneliese Schleyer, MD (UW Harborview)

The Quality Portfolio Working Group for the Academic Hospitalist Taskforce in cooperation with SGIM